...etc. Of course that's also problematic if you want to edit an individual letter. So I find the style below a bit better (especially when using a modern editor like edlin). Plus it uses a more descriptive name than the bland "@folk"...

That style of code is totally ugly and unusable. What if your original list of data erroneously switched two characters and you now have to swap the last and next-to-last character? This coding style is flawed in that aspect. You should use the following coding style instead:

That style of code is totally ugly and unusable [...] You should use the following coding style instead:

No, no, no! Yours is better than the previous alternatives but one may still get confused when swapping bits. And all those calls to chr, oh my! Now pack can do all this for cheap. Thus you should use the following coding style instead:

Except that one would almost certainly want to write a specialized sub to do this, should he later change his mind with respect to the order in which to store bits into chars, chars into strings and strings into the array: